Black Russian Woman Graduates Cum Laude in U.S. : She finds things to admire and things to dislike in America.

She used to dye her hair red, wear tight dresses and sing rhythm and blues with the Exotics, a Soviet version of Ray Charles’ Raylettes. Since the group featured four black women born and raised in the Soviet Union, the name seemed to fit.

“That’s what we were, exotic,” said 24-year old Anastasia Mensah. “People looked on us as something unusual.”

Mensah smiles, remembering the days when the Exotics toured the Baltic republics, Siberia and Kazakhstan. She is sitting in a conference room at the Smithsonian Institute’s Air and Space Museum, where she works as a translator. In a city that is 70% black, Mensah is no longer a racial curiosity. But she is still “unusual”: last month, when she was graduated cum laude from the University of the District of Columbia, she became what is believed to be the first Russian of African-American descent to graduate from an American college. And therein lies a tale.

George Tynes, Mensah’s maternal grandfather, was a nonpolitical agricultural specialist who was recruited from the United States by the Soviets and moved to Russia in 1933. He married a Ukrainian woman and stayed in the Soviet Union, where he managed a number of large poultry farms. Mensah’s mother, a teacher, married a native of Ghana. Mensah was raised in Ghana and Liberia for a few years but spent most of her life in the Soviet Union.

Growing up in Moscow, with a native black population of about 70 people, Mensah was nothing if not different. “There was always curiosity,” she said, “because many of the children had never seen black people. But after a while, I would be accepted and treated like everybody else.”

If Mensah had problems, it had more to do with her mixed cultural background. Was she Russian? American? African? Mensah’s grandfather would tell her what life was like in the States (1930s version). He cooked soul food at home, listened to jazz records, hung out with Americans who visited the Soviet Union and brought back copies of Ebony and Jet when he visited his family in Virginia.

“When I was around Americans, I felt I was American,” Mensah said of this cultural training. But then her mother would visit African friends or attend African embassy functions, and Mensah could not decide who she was.

Then, in 1989, she attended a family reunion in Virginia. It was her first time in America, and it was eye-opening.

“I grew up during the Brezhnev era, and what I always heard was that life in Russia was the best on Earth,” Mensah said. “When they talked about America, they would emphasize the inflation, unemployment and drug addiction. They’d say black people were uneducated, lived in ghettos and don’t have many opportunities.”

Instead, Mensah discovered an extended family of 300 middle-class people. One cousin, Margaret Tynes, is a well-known soprano. Another, the host of the reunion, was a career military man who lived in a three-story house that was the biggest private dwelling Mensah had ever seen.

That reunion was fortuitous in another way. William Davis, a retired diplomat who had known George Tynes since 1959 (Tynes died in 1982), arranged for Mensah to obtain a scholarship at the University of the District of Columbia. Davis and one of Mensah’s cousins have also paid her expenses for the three years she has been here.

The predominantly black school gave Mensah a total immersion course in her roots. American blacks were shocked to hear her accent, thick as chilled vodka; then they would bombard her with questions about life in the Soviet Union. An English major, she had a chance to read a lot of African-American literature and found that “things like slave narratives really touched me, made me feel I am a part of this culture.”

Mensah learned to appreciate the best of America--the sense of community among blacks, the material abundance, the variety of foods and beauty salons that could actually style her hair. She developed a taste for Whitney Houston, Anita Baker, Arsenio Hall and “I Love Lucy” reruns.

But living here has also given her a chance to see the “dark side, the advantages and disadvantages of the capitalist system--inflation, unemployment, racial tension.”

Mensah’s job at the Smithsonian ends in a few weeks. She is looking for work as an interpreter or as a teacher of Russian, or English as a second language. She would like to stay here another year, then return home to teach English.

“I was glad to come to America to become more familiar with black culture,” she said. “But I also learned that people are very similar, Russians and Americans. They are all concerned with peace and prosperity, for their country and their children.”